Using Technology to Enhance Student Voice

A few years ago, I was given an opportunity to shadow a grade six multilingual learner for one entire school day. My goal was to truly understand the student experience in our building. If you have never participated in a “shadow a student” challenge, I cannot recommend it enough.

Throughout the school day, my student only spoke twice: once to sharpen a pencil and once to ask to use the bathroom. While other students were engaged in the classroom activities, his voice was silent. This experience profoundly affected me and made me reflect: How could we empower students like this one to better communicate and share their ideas? Was this the experience that all of our students had, and if so, what were we missing?

What we lacked was an intentional framework to amplify every student’s voice. This gap led me to develop the 5Cs, grounded in the belief that technology can not only provide access to learning, but deepen and extend it.

My 5 Cs of student voice

1. Clickable: Removing barriers to participation. Before you begin using a technology in your classroom setting, consider how easily these tools can be utilized. Are the tools that you use intuitive, or do they require significant time to learn how to use them? The tech tool should not act as a barrier for students to access them. Programs that rely primarily on text-based navigation can act as a barrier for emerging readers and multilingual learners. Instead, consider tools that promote access and use icons or symbols as part of their navigation, like Wixie and Book Creator.

2. Choice: Multimodal options. Do the technology tools you use provide choice? Choice means more than just letting your student choose one activity or another: It empowers them with multimodal options to share their ideas. One of my favorite ways to do this is with a “blank page,” or a versatile tech tool that offers many different options to share the students’ thinking.

For example, a student might be asked to reflect on what they have learned during a unit. Rather than having every student respond the same way, students can choose between using dictation, making an audio recording, typing text, or recording a video to share ideas. Tools such as Wixie, Book Creator, Canva, and Adobe Express all provide students with a variety of multimodal options.

3. Curation: Focus on synthesis. Our students live in a world where information is at their fingertips. When we consider the access that students have to information, it is truly astounding. Finding information and synthesizing it is an essential skill. Do the technology tools you use help students in this pursuit? Do they help them organize information to better help them communicate their ideas?

One of my favorite ways to do this is to provide students with curation charts and thinking routines. Curation charts are essentially graphic organizers where students can leverage “choice” and use multimodal thinking to record their ideas. Thinking routines, created by Project Zero from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, help students to make their thinking visible by using intentional scaffolds. There is a whole toolbox of thinking routines available, but my favorites for this purpose are the ones that help students synthesize and organize their ideas.

As with curation charts, students can leverage multimodal thinking and choice when communicating their ideas. Tools like Wixie and Book Creator offer premade templates for these types of charts, making them accessible to all learners.

4. Collaboration: Shared digital spaces. Do the tech tools that you use provide students the opportunities to work collaboratively? In today’s world, we need to help students develop these skills. They need to learn how to respect each other’s digital spaces, the same way they need to learn how to respect each other’s physical spaces. We need to scaffold these skills for our students.;

I approach scaffolding these skills as part of a continuum that starts with the most scaffolded step: turn-taking collaboration. My favorite tech tool for this is Pear Deck’s Flashcard Factory, since it allows students to work as partners where each student has a role in the flashcard creation: One student is the artist, while the other acts as the writer. As students work together, they each contribute part of the “flashcard” but cannot edit each other’s work digitally.

The second step in that continuum is color-coded collaboration. This step is also scaffolded but uses color as the students’ guide. Students also work as partners, with one student on Team Blue (they work on the blue pages) and the other student on Team Red (they work on the red pages). Students both answer an initial prompt on their own pages and then respond to their partner’s work on their colored feedback page. This helps our students understand how to respect each other’s digital space and how to provide feedback, key skills needed for collaboration. This continuum is part of a larger progression that ultimately builds toward project-based learning.

5. Connection: The authentic audience. When school is only about compliance, students focus on being “good,” rather than being heard. What if students had the opportunity to connect with authentic audiences to share their ideas and saw the potential of learning as a way to highlight their creations? That is what connection is about. The teacher does not need to be the only audience for our students. We can use digital tools to open the doors of our classrooms and give our students a voice outside its doors. Give them a digital refrigerator to share their work with others, including their families and peers. Consider the impact of using Padlet or a similar tool to have your students share their work and get feedback from their peers.

With the 5 Cs, the devices in your classroom amplify all of our students’ voices, rather than just being used for consumption. They empower all of our students with the digital-age skills they need and give that “silent student” a voice.